Following the complete exoneration of President Trump on the hoax allegations of collusion with Russia, the legacy media is attempting to pick up the pieces and investigate what went wrong.

The New York Times, which inserted — without evidence — mountains of anonymously sourced false information into the American mainstream consciousness, has taken a renewed focus on the Steele dossier, which was reportedly an integral piece of source material for the Obama administration’s surveillance operation against the Trump campaign.

“Now the dossier — financed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and compiled by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — is likely to face new, possibly harsh scrutiny from multiple inquiries,” The Times reports.

Christopher Steele and his Steele dossier were just one element of a campaign that was not only being financed, but appeared to be entirely manufactured and controlled by Hillary Clinton and the DNC. The Russia collusion hoax originated with Hillary Clinton, and the burden should be on her campaign and the DNC. It butchers the chain of responsibility to hold Christopher Steele, the contracted “researcher,” ultimately accountable for defending everything that spawned from the Clinton-DNC operation, which was later leveraged by the Obama administration.

The fraudulent narrative that Donald Trump was a Russian agent began to make its way into the media — and throughout the Obama Intelligence Community — during the late stages of the 2016 presidential election, likely as a means to help candidate Hillary Clinton secure her electoral victory by delegitimizing her opponent through the use of a black propaganda operation.

During the campaign, Team Clinton hired Fusion GPS, which then worked with Steele to produce and disseminate the dossier, according to the media narrative.

But we must also recall that in parallel with the Fusion GPS campaign, political operatives with deep ties to the Clinton family emerged with a reported second dossier — which according to reports, was practically identical to the Steele dossier — and began to disseminate to the media its false information about Donald Trump’s supposed ties to the Russians.

But the “second dossier” was too close to Hillary Clinton, and media outlets, likely recognizing that they would be identified as even greater shills for Clinton, recognized dossier number twoas a political document and largely refused to run a story detailing its allegations, but for an embarrassingly hackish story in The Guardian.

Although he had potential legal baggage as a foreigner and former British spy working on a U.S. political campaign, Steele’s credentials still provided the necessary authority to make his dossier appear as legitimate intelligence. Still, many saw the dossier for what it was — junk opposition “research” without any confirmed sources. Not even the likes of The New York Times and Washington Post would publish a dossier crafted by Christopher Steele, let alone Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer, the Clinton family political hatchet men. But that’s what BuzzFeed is for. BuzzFeed publishing the Steele dossier — to this day, not a single major allegation in the dossier has been confirmed — gave a green light to the rest of the media to “report” on its absurd claims. The bogus dossier also provided the justification for the Obama administration (and later, rogue FBI directors in the Trump administration) to leverage the dossier to conduct surveillance on Trump-connected individuals.

Because Steele was a “former spy,” that seemed to be enough for the likes of the late Sen. John McCain, fired FBI Director James Comey, former CIA chief John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and many other top lawmakers and government officials to stand by Steele’s Clinton-backed work for years. But now that the Mueller investigation has ended, those aforementioned former government officials are nowhere to be found when it comes to taking responsibility for advancing the Steele dossier.

If Congress and the media are going to scrutinize what went wrong, their focus should begin with the Hillary Clinton campaign, and particularly Hillary Clinton herself. Was it merely a coincidence that the second dossier mirrored the first, or was Steele just a front man for the Russia hoax? To cast Christopher Steele as the man ultimately responsible for Spygate is to protect the individuals responsible for spawning the Russia hoax.

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Author: Jordan Schachtel

Jordan Schachtel is the national security correspondent for Conservative Review and editor of The Dossier for Blaze Media. Follow him on Twitter @JordanSchachtel.